Spaceship

Going out to pick up the stored luggage at Nance's yesterday Townsville Secondary School was passed on the elevated MRT. Late afternoon heat gone out of the day, the girls playing on court seemed fitting enough from the train window. The colour among them could easily have been from the namesake town down in the south. Looking at rooms again the day before—still holed up in the Love hotel—reminded of Dakota MRT close by on Mountbatten Road. Plains Indians out on the reservations how many generations now were not dissimilar to the case of the former kampung folk here. On the train a patch of dense jungle came into view at one point, the layered greenery and thick trailing vines momentarily flashing Tarzan movies, Johnny W. and Cheetah. At Admiralty the crowded McDonalds unexpectedly shocked; on the approach the signage had nowhere been visible. How did they pack them in so effortlessly with barely a seat vacant? How the advertising sucker so?... Night freeway blur taxiing back gave lit condo rooms with more than one hanging chandelier and an illegal Indian footslogger along the Expressway. One had become accustomed to only high-polished late model shine on the roads here; an old bomb in this landscape would stand out like dogs' balls; like a dinosaur emerged from prehistoric terrain. (Lately Queensland was turning up the old fossils at a rate of knots.) Cabbie had the AC on freeze, yet from his side there seemed to be a heater vent blowing contra-wise. The man wore a windbreaker and listened to commercial English hipster radio with its inflected patter that would have gone entirely over his Chinese head. (A dozen times over the trip the automated American voice warned of excessive speed.) At the Admiralty Chow stall the exchanges with the customers had all been in Chinese, the busy chap at the register surprised enough at the White to ask for origins. On the train earlier only one or two Whites had been aboard. Little "foreign talent" was to be found in the North-west industrial zone of the island, only Indians, Malaysians and Mainlanders. There was rarely any sense of separation from the people on the racial or cultural level; it was the drug-like disorientation of place, of locale, the make-believe unreal of the physical environment machine-gunning the brain Ratta-tat-tat—Ratta-tat-tat—Ratta-tat-tat. (Trumpeted, admired and re-produced throughout the region and the wider world as utmost perfection in urban planning.)